Second in order of horrific fears was her new paranoia about being sealed off for good on her father’s estate for having the wrong kind of fangs, never to set foot beyond its boundaries again.
The shocked look in the ghost wulf’s eyes dogged her. That look had warned her about her changes. The blood on her fingers had confirmed it.
But she and the ghost wulf had fully mated. Their connection had been consummated. Two entities in transition, and who hadn’t a clue as to what they were becoming, had kissed and then bedded. And despite the push to run away, Rosalind desperately wanted a rematch with him. Her body ached for another bed, or a stretch of green lawn...anywhere private enough to have the ghost wulf inside her.
“I have fangs. What does that make me?” she shouted into the quiet night.
Half-naked, she moved between the trees as if she’d become a part of the breeze blowing through them. After her shout, she clamped her jaws and tried not to swallow the sickeningly sweet thickness of the blood filling her mouth.
Out here, unprotected by fathers and fences and a hundred acres of bayou swampland, she had to find answers or die trying. She was both herself, and not. A glob of darkness had partially taken her over, and if that darkness continued to spread in so swift a manner, there would be no gauging how long she had before being completely overcome by some new entity.
What would such a thing do to her mate? To their connection?
If she were no longer Lycan, would their imprinting fade?
If she were to become a vampire, they would be enemies.
The outline of the first large tree lay ahead, an old tree with scarred bark. Glancing up at it, Rosalind bent her knees and jumped, landing on the lowest branch perched on both feet, and with perfect balance.
She uttered a hoarse, muffled cry of terror at what she had just done. Kneeling now, she compressed herself into as small a mass as possible, with her arms wrapped around her knees. The vampires they had fought here had been hanging in these trees like bats, and she seemed precariously close to doing the same thing.
That seemed unthinkable, unreasonable. To the best of her knowledge, she hadn’t been bitten or scratched when she’d joined the fight. Vampire blood and venom couldn’t have reached her bloodstream, so there was no reason for vamp fangs to have appeared inside her mouth, and no explanation at all for being in a tree when werewolves were earthbound creatures.
She looked at the ground, thinking about how the bloodsuckers had stopped attacking her after she issued the howl that had summoned the other Weres. She was unable to see anything in it that would have caused the startling changes taking place.
So, why had the vampires backed off her before that fight had ended?
Why had she always been kept away from other Weres?
Did the answers to those questions go hand in hand?
Damn it, didn’t her father understand that she, of all Weres, needed to know these things, and that it would be impossible to go on without knowing? Look what was happening to her now!
Blinking back tears of frustration served to clear her vision. Inhaling the night opened her senses enough to recognize the strong scent of humans strolling through the corners of the park, probably lacking the courage to trespass deeper into it.
She smelled their clothes, all the way down to the fabric and dye. She smelled their musky perfume.
“Nothing extraordinary,” she whispered with relief. “Just more wulf senses.”
Beneath her, the odor of vamp ash had gone. In the distance, behind Landau’s protective walls, she sensed the ghost wulf moving.
“We’re mated, and I don’t really know you.”
Rosalind hated the tears that ran down her cheeks.
Chapter 8
It took a full minute for Colton’s eyes to adjust enough to pick the Weres out of the dark landscape, then he counted six large bodies in man-form before getting to his feet.
He glanced up at the sky to gauge the position of the moon, then focused on the Weres who weren’t furred-up because the moon had passed her full phase.
“Landau’s pack, I presume?” he said, feeling unnaturally winded and as if he might be sleepwalking. How long had he been here? he wondered.
“Did you see her?” he asked.
“Who?” one of them replied.
“Rosalind.”
“Rosalind Kirk?” another Were queried.
This speaker was a big man. Tall, well built, fair-haired and recognizable as Miami’s Deputy District Attorney, Dylan Landau was Judge Landau’s only son and pure Lycan through and through. Dressed casually in tan slacks and a soft blue shirt that spoke of wealth and privilege, and without one hint of the stink of the previous night’s vampire attack on him, Dylan was a key figure in the fight against crime in this city, and lethal in his own right.
Beside Judge Landau’s son stood another outstanding specimen of Werehood, slightly on the rougher side. Brown-haired, hard-featured, this guy’s strong shoulders were shown off by a tight black T-shirt. His faded jeans were threaded with a belt that had a badge pinned to it. The golden shield of a detective.
This guy with the badge was Were, but not purebred Lycan. And since he was here with the Landaus, it had to either be Adam Scott or Matt Wilson that faced him, both of whom had been inducted into the Were clan after they’d been bitten while on the job. Both had helped to clean up a werewolf fighting ring last year run by a creep named Chavez. That feat alone could have earned either Scott or Wilson access to Landau’s full-blooded pack. Among Weres, the Red Wolf and Wolf Trap cases were hailed as notorious.
He guessed the Were in the T-shirt was Wilson, without knowing why. Any other time, he would have been honored to meet the guy in person.
“Then you haven’t see her,” Colton said, straining to see beyond the line of formidable muscle barring his exit.
“No one has seen her,” Dylan Landau said.
“She exited from that window.” Colton pointed up at the house. Talking took a monumental effort. “I need to find her. You can help by pointing me in the right direction if your senses are working better than mine at the moment. I seem to be stuck in healing overload.”
When Dylan Landau shook his head, the shoulder-length blond hair he was famous for spilled over his shoulders. “We’re not supposed to follow her.”
“Rosalind,” Colton said. “Her name is Rosalind.”
“Yes, I know,” Dylan said.
“Then you do know about her.”
“I know of her.”
“What does that mean?”
“As I said, no one here has seen Rosalind. We’ve only heard rumors about her, and we’ve just returned to the compound several minutes ago.”
“I’ll be on my way, then,” Colton said.
Landau and Wilson stepped forward at the same time to stop him. Colton nodded in understanding. “You’re here to keep me from leaving?”
“Are you ready to leave?” Wilson asked.
“Don’t I look like it?” Colton replied cynically.
He had avoided Miami’s underworld of werewolves in order to better keep his own family’s secrets, and regretted that decision now. Like him, these Weres used their special abilities to fight the bad guys, and wore their secrets well. They were distant cousins, of a sort. Comrades, if their packs were ever to socialize.
Yet he still felt coated in something heavy that dragged at the edges of his awareness. And the female he had bedded had sprouted fangs, jumped from a three-story window, and had gotten away with it.
“Actually, no,” Wilson said. “You don’t look like you’re ready to go anywhere, especially if that means seeing people you know, or encountering the sort of creatures that seem to be making their home in the park.”
Yes. The albino hair would be hard to expl
ain, Colton admitted to himself. He’d have to shave it off before he showed up at his apartment. As for seeing others, these Weres were right, of course. He wasn’t ready to go anywhere. He could barely handle being around those of his own kind. His senses were firing on too many cylinders. The night was filled with external chatter and the mingled smells of way too many things.
He felt sick. He felt different. And his face looked like a Frankenstein creation.
Worse than that, strange impulses flowed through him that he didn’t dare to address, shouting at him with all the hype of his brain being hit repeatedly with a Taser. These Weres were kin, if not by line or by blood, then by species, and yet he wanted to kill them all for getting in his way. For stopping him from going after Rosalind.
But then Weres didn’t kill other Weres, except out of dire necessity, when no other course of action was feasible and trouble rained down.
Colton had to pry his mouth open to speak, and fisted his hands to keep them still. “The question remaining on the table is whether you’re the welcoming committee, or actually here to keep me from following Rosalind.”
Dylan Landau spoke again, probably afforded that leeway because this was his family’s house. “This isn’t a prison, Colton. It’s a place of healing. A safe haven. We know what those suckers did to your family. You are welcome here.”
It had been a long time since anyone had called him by his first name, and Colton took another hit of regret. He had to close his eyes briefly to sidestep a rise of emotion that caused a tug-of-war with his darker side.
Closing his eyes turned out to be a terrible idea, though. The night crowded in, clamoring with noise not unlike the static from his police radio, turned up to max. His ears rang. His head began to pound. He had no idea what frequency he was tuning in to, or what could be happening to him.
As his legs faltered, Colton caught himself before going down.
Landau had taken another step in his direction. As he did, Colton began to hear and comprehend that Were’s thoughts, as well as the thoughts of the others. Those thoughts rushed in, overlapping, getting louder.
“What’s going on?” he muttered, keeping his hands at his sides with a concerted effort.
The voices of the Weres across from him were like raised shouts.
Can we help him, after what’s happened and what he has become? he heard one voice ask.
Ghost wulfs are creatures of legend. How can this be possible? said another.
He feels different, smells different.
Vampire scum did this. What can we do to help? There must be a way. He’s one of us.
How could he have seen her, when no one else has?
Why is he asking for the freak?
Colton spoke to stop the deluge of what had to be a sudden arrival of a telepathic link to all of them. The chatter was driving him mad. He didn’t like the word freak.
“I don’t know what I am. I believe I might no longer be like you,” he said, hanging on to his anger by the thinnest thread of self-control. “Something happened to me. I don’t belong here.”
“Let us help.” That was Dylan.
“I need time to heal.”
“You can do that here.”
“I have to find Rosalind. If I’m like this, I have to know what has happened to her.”
Dylan spoke again in a quieter tone. “I’ll just ask you to think twice about disrespecting a father’s wishes for his daughter’s safety and well-being, whoever she is. We were warned against trying to see her.”
“I have no intention of harming her.” Colton cleared his throat, feeling as though something had gotten stuck in it.
“Then why the claws?” Wilson asked.
Colton looked down in surprised confusion. His claws had sprung, and were on full display. These Weres would be wondering how he managed that without a full moon.
He was equally as curious.
In the presence of a full moon, the others present would have to assume he was angry. Emotion tended to let transformations slip now and then. But here, now, their faces were dark with worry. None of them knew how adept he was at changing any time the mood struck him, rather than having to wait for the moon’s permission. Only his family’s line could do that, another reason for the Killion’s remaining apart from the others. Nevertheless, the claws were a problem. He hadn’t invited them into being, or even felt his hands change. One moment the claws weren’t there, and the next moment they were, which meant that another potentially harmful secret had just escaped its net.
“I’ve been ill,” he said, growing more and more anxious about the expressions on the faces in front of him. Inside him, his wulf gave a perfunctory whine.
“My beast takes advantage of the opportunity,” he said, with no idea how or if these Weres would accept such an explanation. He’d never messed up like this before. It was as if his will were sliding back and forth between forms and he could no longer be entirely certain which shape was which, or who was in charge. It was as if the beast no longer lay curled up inside, awaiting its turn, but actually coated the surface of his skin.
He felt as though he had one foot trapped inside the tunnel of night that had swallowed him out there in the park, and like he had stumbled into a pit of quicksand.
Through it all, because of all that, a need unlike any he had ever experienced drove him, compelled him, toward what light he imagined remained open to him. He had to reach that light, find the one voice he craved above all others. He had to find Rosalind. Only then could he find himself.
Rosalind didn’t care about the white hair. She’d seen the ghost, seen him. She had encouraged him to open his eyes, and then had opened her legs. And she had been right to warn him that being separated from her would hurt.
The desire for Rosalind was bigger than that, larger than the universe, and in this kind of need had to rest the answer to the riddle that had struck him in darkness.
Why had the vampires arrived here, now?
“Colton?”
Adam Wilson called him back to a reality that had him facing a wall of wary, sympathetic faces.
“I know a place where you can take all the time you need to get better if you’re worried about staying here,” Wilson said.
“Speaking as a friend or the shrink you once were?” Colton asked.
Wilson smiled. “I wasn’t aware that anyone knew of my former profession.”
“Everyone at Metro knows. You’re a hero there for what you did to help take the Chavez gang down.”
“Okay. Then I suppose the next question is what you’ll do when you find Rosalind?” Wilson said.
“You mean while I’m like this?” Colton ran a claw through his white hair.
“Yes,” Wilson replied frankly. “If you don’t know what’s happening to you, how can you be sure Rosalind will be safe?”
“I gave her my promise not to worry about that.”
Wilson nodded. “Then you have seen her, spoken to her.”
“Were you thinking that I might have made her up?”
“Of course not. But other than a handful of elders, we just learned that no one here has known for sure of her existence before tonight. We only found out that she’d been here when we returned to find her scent in the air. Female Were, but nothing usual. Maybe you can tell us why the secrecy surrounding her is so great, and what the hell happened here while we were gone.”
Again, Colton felt his human physical form begin to waver. His hands and face pulsed as if a full shift were imminent. He actually began to fear what that shape might be, since he felt so strange.
“Colton,” Wilson said.
“Yes, I’ve seen her,” Colton muttered. “She’s beautiful.”
When he looked at the faces staring back, it was to find that the Weres had stepped back and dra
wn together in an automatic pack response to sniffing out trouble.
Colton glanced down at himself to see patches of white fur covering his bare arms. He felt his body starting to strain against the tightness of the borrowed jeans.
“Well, well,” Matt Wilson muttered with a sharp intake of breath. “What have we here?”
Chapter 9
Rosalind swiped at her tears.
Glancing down at herself, she saw that black fur covered her bare legs. Though the transition to wulf appeared to have stopped halfway up her shivering body, she sighed with relief, taking the fur as a good sign.
Her apprehension returned when she noticed that the overall scent of the park had changed. Its feel had changed.
She glanced toward the Landau compound with the certainty that her ghost wulf would soon come after her, and that she had no way to prevent it. She didn’t want him to see her like this.
Another smell came to her unexpectedly, delaying her departure. People. Two of them. Male humans in pressed pants, wearing shoes with rubberized soles. She caught a whiff of leather, mixed with bits of metal and the dampness of perspiration.
Reflexively, she backed up on the branch, and pressed herself to the tree’s resinous bark.
“No one has seen the bastard since the Tuesday night,” a gritty voice remarked.
Rosalind recognized something familiar in the slightly nasal tone.
“He didn’t show up for work. We learned that his family lives on the block where the other family was murdered. No one has heard from Killion’s people, either. Neighbors say they’re reclusive, travel often, and therefore might have been out of town when those killings went down.”
“Lucky for them,” the second voice chimed in.
“Yeah, so where is Killion? I saw him in the alley behind his family’s house, then he disappeared.”
“Maybe he knew those people and he needs time to mourn.”
“He’s a cop, Jack. We mourn with expressionless cop faces and then come back for more. You know that. He didn’t call in, just up and disappeared. It’s strange.”
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